[Timeline: Day 3 of the Tournament – Finals] [Location: The Arena Floor]

"I'm right?" Nero raised an eyebrow. He looked at the bloody girl limping toward him with a shard of glass in her hand.

"Right about what?"

Elena didn't answer immediately. She coughed, a spray of red staining her chin. She adjusted her grip on the jagged lens shard, letting it slice into her own palm. The pain kept her awake.

"About my family," Elena rasped. "About pride."

She took another step. Her left leg dragged behind her, the broken shinbone grinding.

"My mother taught me that magic is art," Elena whispered, her voice gaining a strange, hollow strength.

"She taught me that Solaris never bend their back no matter what."

She looked at her ruined uniform. She looked at her broken fingers.

"But art doesn't win fights, does it, Nero? Survival does."

Nero scoffed. "And you think you can survive me with a piece of trash in your hand?"

"I don't need to survive you," Elena said, stopping five meters away. Her golden eye locked onto his face.

"I just need to reach you."

Nero's expression darkened. He was bored of the speech.

"Die," Nero said simply.

He raised his index finger. He didn't bother with a massive spell. He fired a condensed beam of high-heat solar mana, a [Sun Finger] aimed directly at her heart.

It was fast. Faster than sound.

Any sane mage would try to dodge. Any noble mage would try to block with a shield.

Elena did neither.

She stepped into the beam.

FWOOSH.

The crowd screamed.

Elena twisted her body at the last microsecond. The beam didn't hit her heart. It hit her shoulder, the same shoulder Alaric had scorched earlier.

The smell of burning meat filled the air instantly. The pain was blinding, enough to knock a grown man unconscious.

But Elena didn't fall. She used the impact of the beam to spin.

As the beam tore through her shoulder, she raised her hand, the one holding the shard of the Photon Lens.

She didn't try to block the beam. She caught the edge of it.

'Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection,' she thought, Damien's voice echoing in her mind.

His knowledge from the blue star had been well taught to all his students, and it times like this, it really came into play

Boom!

She jammed the shard into the path of Nero's attack.

The glass instantly superheated. It glowed white-hot, searing the flesh of her hand, fusing the glass to her bone.

But for a fraction of a second, before the shard melted... it reflected.

The beam bounced off the angled glass.

It shot back at Nero.

Nero wasn't expecting it. Why would he? Nobody steps into a laser. Nobody catches fire with their bare hands.

The reflected beam was erratic, weaker than the original, but it was fast.

It flashed past Nero's guard.

SSZT.

A thin line of heat grazed Nero's left cheek.

The beam dissipated. Elena collapsed to her knees, clutching her smoking shoulder, gasping for air. The shard in her hand crumbled into dust.

Silence descended on the arena.

Nero stood perfectly still. He blinked, slowly.

He raised a hand to his face. He touched his cheek.

He pulled his fingers away.

They were wet.

Red.

Drop.

A single droplet of blood fell from his face, landing on the pristine white cuff of his uniform.

The crowd stared. The cameras zoomed in.

The sacred prince had bled.

"You..." Nero whispered.

His voice trembling with anger and suprise.

He looked at the blood on his finger. Then he looked at Elena.

His golden eyes changed. The pupils vanished. The irises expanded until his entire eye was a glowing, terrifying white orb.

The temperature in the stadium skyrocketed. The banners hanging from the stands caught fire spontaneously. The water in the moats began to boil.

"YOU FILTHY RAT!"

Nero screamed, his voice distorting into a demonic roar.

The "Perfect Prince" was gone. In his place was a monster of pure ego.

"YOU DARED TO TOUCH ME?!"

Nero raised both hands. A ball of white plasma the size of a house began to form above his head.

The air rippled and distorted. The stone floor beneath him melted into lava.

[Sun Magic: Supernova Execution.]

He wasn't aiming to knock her out. He was aiming to vaporize her. He was aiming to vaporize the referee.

He was aiming to turn the entire northern quadrant of the arena into a crater.

"DIE!" Nero shrieked. "BURN TO ASH!"

"ELENA!" Alaric screamed from the med bay, smashing his body against the glass until it finally cracked.

In the VIP Box, Damien stood up. The cane in his hand snapped in two. Shadows began to coil around his feet.

He prepared to Shadow Step, even if it meant revealing his identity.

Elena looked up at the miniature sun descending toward her. She couldn't move. She couldn't breathe.

'At least...' she thought, a faint smile touching her lips. 'I made him bleed.'

Nero brought his hands down.

KRA-KOOOOOOM.

A sound tore through the world.

But it didn't come from Nero.

It came from the sky.

Above the arena, the blue sky shattered. It didn't just cloud over; it cracked like a mirror hit by a hammer.

RRRRRRRIIIIIIP.

A massive, jagged tear opened in the fabric of reality, stretching from horizon to horizon.

Purple lightning, thick as skyscrapers, lashed down, striking the arena barrier and shattering it instantly.

Nero's sun wavered. The atmospheric pressure dropped so low that people's ears popped.

From the tear in the sky, five figures descended.

They walked on the very air!

The first figure was draped in robes of rotting grey cloth. Where he walked, the clouds turned to ash.

The second was a woman made of living magma.

The third was a colossus of bone.

The Twilight Association.

"The Seal will be broken," a voice boomed from the sky, sounding like a thousand people speaking at once. "Tartarus will open."

Suddenly, the ground beneath the arena erupted.

ROAR!

Massive, insectoid beasts, Void Hounds burst from the earth, clawing their way into the sunlight.

Panic erupted in the stands. People screamed, trampling each other to get to the exits.

"DEFENSIVE PROTOCOL OMEGA!" Headmistress Astra's voice blasted over the intercom, sounding strained.

"ALL STUDENTS EVACUATE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!"

Five streaks of light shot up from the Academy Spire. Astra and the Hidden Guardians rushed to meet the invaders in the sky.

BOOM.

The clash of ten Demi-Gods released a shockwave that flattened the VIP boxes.

In the center of the chaos, the arena floor was a war zone. Dust, debris, and monsters were everywhere.

But Nero didn't look up.

He ignored the sky breaking. He ignored the monsters. He ignored the panic.

He was staring at Elena. His eyes were still white with insanity.

"You think this saves you?" Nero whispered, his voice cutting through the apocalypse.

He walked toward her, flames licking at his heels. A Void Hound lunged at him, and Nero incinerated it with a wave of his hand without even looking at it.

He stopped over Elena.

"I don't care if the world ends," Nero said, raising his hand, the solar fire condensing into a blade.

"I will kill you first."

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